1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to mobile communications networks, and specifically to databases supporting personalization of mobile communications services.
2. Background Art
The rapid and widespread success of mobile broadband services has sparked exponential growth in mobile communications services and mobile data traffic. This traffic boom is driven by the popularity of smartphones, electronic book readers, laptop data cards and the like that have stimulated a dramatic increase in the number of mobile subscribers and their use of advanced applications such as, for example, mobile Internet browsing, video services, gaming, and location-based services. As advanced applications have grown more common, the need and desire to personalize services to individual subscribers has also increased dramatically. The ability to personalize communications services requires the use of very large databases that dynamically track subscriber usage, store subscriber profiles, and monitor subscriber state or activities within one or more network.
Systems and methods to support the personalization of mobile services need to be able to support small and large networks, such as, for example handling more than 100 billion transactions in a single month for a large wireless service provider, and being able to scale from 5,000 to over 100 million subscribers. To personalize services, mobile subscriber databases often need to be accessed tens of thousands of times per second from the network domain to support network applications. Unfortunately, the performance of conventional database solutions supports only a few hundred queries per second on cost-effective conventional hardware. Thus, having applications directly interfaced with subscriber databases is problematic and limiting. Additionally, from an administration perspective, performing upgrades or recovery of administrative aspects of subscriber databases often requires the shutdown or further slowdown in the ability to access the databases to support network applications. Such a situation is undesirable as it may lead to dropped services or lost revenue resulting from service unavailability.
As a result the extensive growth of mobile broadband services are introducing extremely demanding requirements to the control plane databases. Specifically, transaction rates are increasing asymptotically requiring very demanding response times (milliseconds). Additionally, adding to the demands and complexity is the shift of transactions from read-mainly to almost equal read-write situations. Lastly, the extremely high availability of data is adding to the challenges of managing the data effectively.
Unfortunately, scalability by purely adding more systems is not a viable option from an economics and a complexity management perspective. Traditional database technologies such a SQL or LDAP, while providing dependable services and complex ways to organize and query the data are not addressing the emerging extreme performance growth requirements.
What is required is a hybrid architecture that leverages the strengths of the traditional DBs in the data administration domain, while delivering the extreme performance growth requirements in the network domain.